Re: My thoughts on C# and gaming.

Out of interest, which platforms are you targeting? One of the reasons  
that Lua is so popular in the games industry is that it works on 360,  
ps3, etc. If you're also targeting the consoles and using c#, are you  
using a version of mono?

Cliff :-)


On 24/02/2010, at 2:07 AM, Douglas Cox <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> It's not just a popular language.  It's the dominant scripting
> language of the game industry, which means it is proven in that
> problem domain.  It's popular because it's easy to learn, easy to
> embed, and fast for an interpreted language.  So I'm not buying all
> this hand waving about how dev studios should avoid Lua because "it
> would take 10 devs a week to learn" or some nonsense like that.
> Especially in favor of C#; that only makes sense if the studio is
> already heavily into C# development.
>
> Well, dominant and ideal can obviously be two different things in  
> this case.  If we were starting for scratch, I'd say that we would  
> be likely using Lua or Squirrel just to get something running.  But  
> seeing how quickly a simple scripting language can be pushed to its  
> limits, and how some people will prematurely throw them out and  
> revert to C++ based solely on assumed performance, we wanted a  
> solution that we could finally say with some confidence "it is the  
> code, not the language, causing the performance problems."
>
> As far as having 15 people learn Lua when they already know C++  
> pretty well, I do not feel that we can easily dismiss that and just  
> say "go learn Lua".  Yes, everyone could learn it, and we could  
> spend a while trying to learn what not to do, but in our case it was  
> easier to teach things we already knew and to hire people that were  
> already familiar with what we were using.  I will say that we have  
> had several times the number of applicants with C# experience vs Lua.
>
> I'm not trying to start a war over which is better, because I don't  
> think one is the "best".  But I do feel that it should be up to the  
> group of people that will be using it to decide based on what they  
> feel will make them more productive.
>
> -Doug
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